These platforms are starting to let people bet on wildfire activity. What a fun way of incentivizing arsonists.

You're conflating your emotions with facts, in a field you very likely know very little about.

Always anonymous, always cowards.

They solved 90% of the problem and think they're nearly done, when it's more like having solved 90% of perpetual motion.

No amount of pattern recognition is ever going to be enough.

Electrodynamic Tether propulsion tests have been conducted that generated more than 4 newtons of force -- 9 orders of magnitude more than a nano-newton.

The tethers were much longer than a shoe box, but achieving milli-newtons of force with a shoebox sized superconducting magnet isn't unreasonable (near the earth).

Although in theory you could push into higher and higher orbits until you reach escape velocity,
I think this is only going to be good for station keeping -- basically just enough propulsion to cancel air friction/orbital decay, or maybe lift from NEO to GEO over a long time.

Insane Clown Posse, is that you?

Once they realized you'd pay the hire price, if the fees are gone, the businesses are just going to go 'yummy more money for me'.

This is dumb shit. Many stores around me explicitly charge you the difference if you pay by credit card to cover the service fee.

I have never had my debit card compromised. Ever. The fact that it's a direct line is what makes it not usable to buy things online, etc (generally). But it's very nice to use in person - I like that when I spend money, I'm actually spending it and not creating debt. (Don't get me wrong, I always pay off my credit card bills every month, which are not trivial sums .. but I'm only using them because they're the only things you can use online.)

Credit cards, on the other hand - we all pay for the insurance. It's not really the banks problem, its a problem that you have protection for because you pay for it.

"Just give me 1% in cash"

That's still money that comes from somewhere. Like .. from you.

"An opt-out setting that quietly ships settings data off-device is exactly the sort of thing that adds to administrators' workloads rather than lightening them."

Fine, but there's *tons* of them. This is a drip in an ocean. The opposite, settings you need to turn on are also fucking huge depending on the corperate environment it's used in. I mean, fiddling over one setting on a product with a user base as huge and diverse as Windows is nitpicking imo.

Places that have to deal with this are setup to be proactive about the larger problem set.

yeah, damnit, we can't charge you X so we can give X - some amount back to you and call it a reward

fucking reward schemes suck

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

"the manager" lol you sound like you work at a gas station

I remember a story a while back, diamond couriers were losing too many packages due to theft. Their solution? Send the diamonds via regular mail.
Losses in the mail were tiny compared to targeted thefts.

I wonder if it's mail that's the problem, or if it's banks cashing checks they really shouldn't and trying to blame their customers for the banks own negligence.

True, misinformation coming from "trusted" sources is much more damaging than some idiot with a blog posting nonsense, simply by the fact that it's framed as something trusted by so many others.

False dichotomy. Nobody here is talking about an idiot with a blog posting nonsense.

False information coming from sources that "look" trustable but are actually not are very damaging - on purpose, as that is literally the intent.

Incomplete/biased information from trustable sources that are not deliberately attempting to mislead (as in sources that adhere to the ethics of not presenting information that is factually false, even if the picture is not "complete" as you suggest) is a slight wrong, and has existed since the dawn of the printed word - it's editorial in nature - but its effects on creating social problems pales in comparison to weaponized disinformation campaigns.

Hand-wringing about the later as if it's some kind of new thing, or something most people don't know about strikes me as super naive. The insidiousness of the former is simply that people don't appreciate the scale to which it's happening.